Dumas: From the mouths of boys

Published 6:09 pm, Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Poets spend long lonely hours trying to figure out how to express thoughts in new and original ways. They walk over to the side of a subject and around behind it, looking for a new slant on the truth.

Children have no such problems; they don't have to figure out how to be original. The world is new to them and they see it clearly; but struggling to describe what they see and think is a daunting task. From about age 2 to 8, they hack their way through thickets of words and phrases in a fearless effort to communicate. It makes their talk exciting. Children are refreshingly pithy, highly original and brutally candid.

I published an article in Smithsonian magazine about conversations among our three boys when they were little. Here are a few that, due to space limitations, had to be left out.

This evening John was asked, "How much is one and one?" John, who may grow up to become a negotiator, replied, "How about three?"

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Christmas. Timmy got his heart's desire today, a new red tricycle. He kept asking if it was really his, his face alive with wonder and excitement and sheer happiness.

"But is it really mine?"

At last, when we got this fact firmly established, he turned to Davey and said: "Don't touch it."

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At a restaurant, an elderly woman, good looking and well-dressed, sat next to us. She chatted pleasantly with Davey, who sat nearest her. Finally he gave her a long, unblinking look and said: "How old are you?" "Well, sonny," she said, smiling and hesitating, "can you count to 70?" Davey scrutinized her. "I can count to 100."

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I drove Tim to nursery school, he dressed in primary colors -- red boots, blue pants and yellow raincoat. We listened to von Suppe's "Light Cavalry Overture." He accompanied the orchestra on his harmonica, going loud when it did.

"Isn't it loud?" he said.

"Which," I asked, "the radio or you?"

"Both of them," he answered.

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"Did you learn much in school today, John?"

"I learned how to say road in Spanish."

"How does that go, John?"

"El camel."

"I'm pretty sure that's not right."

"In that case I didn't learn anything."

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It is Saturday morning. John complained that all his friends were out of town, there was nothing good on TV and he had nothing to do.

"Read a book," I said to him. "We have hundreds of books in the house. Read one of my books. I wrote `Rabbits Rafferty' for boys and girls just your age. I happen to know that you only read three pages and put it down. `An Afternoon in Waterloo Park' is all about your own father's childhood, and you only read one page of that and never picked it up again."

He looked at me and smiled. "Doesn't that tell you something?"

Jerry Dumas is a writer and cartoonist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker and other periodicals. He lives in Greenwich.